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Salary: CAD 102,000 - 132,000 / annual
Thumbtack is a marketplace platform that helps millions of homeowners care for and improve their homes by connecting them with local service professionals. The company serves as a hiring platform for home services, with a community of 300,000+ local service businesses.
You will own Thumbtack's vendor and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) strategy for Service Operations end-to-end. This is a specialized, high-leverage role focused on outsourced and scaled delivery models—not a generalist program management position. You will be responsible for strategic sourcing decisions, vendor governance, performance management, and long-horizon programs that determine how a significant portion of service delivery is executed.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own the vendor and outsourcing strategy for Service Operations: sourcing decisions, make-versus-buy recommendations, capacity strategy across internal, vendor, and partner channels, and decisions on expanding, consolidating, or exiting partnerships. Manage commercial relationships alongside Legal, Finance, and Procurement, including SOWs, rate structures, SLA credits, and renewals.
- Design and optimize vendor performance governance: SLA and scorecard architecture, QBR structures, decision rights, escalation paths, and remediation playbooks. Build durable, reusable frameworks rather than one-off solutions.
- Own a portfolio of concurrent programs spanning a year or more with real interdependencies. Set strategy, sequence work, make prioritization and capacity calls independently, drive to business outcomes, and establish operating rhythms (cadences, decision logs, dependency tracking, escalation thresholds, change communication) that keep distributed, multi-party delivery predictable.
- Build measurement frameworks for the scaled delivery model: quality, SLA attainment, forecast accuracy, cost-to-serve, and leading indicators that reveal degradation before lagging metrics show problems. Define success criteria and close the loop so performance data drives behavior change on both sides.
- Align senior leaders and drive change across Service Operations, IT, Legal, Finance, Product, and Workforce Management. Translate complex multi-party problems into clear recommendations and drive adoption through teams and partners who don't report to you, including follow-through that ensures change sticks.
- Raise the bar on execution: identify and build AI and automation to reduce coordination overhead and improve oversight at scale. Coach other program managers and institutionalize best practices into playbooks and standards.
Requirements:
- 8+ years in program or project management, including 3+ years owning vendor, BPO, or outsourced delivery relationships at scale. Experience with multiple vendors, multiple sites, or vendor transitions strongly preferred. Proficiency in program management tools (Jira, Linear, Coda, Smartsheet) and fluency in both Agile and Waterfall. PMP, PgMP, or equivalent is nice-to-have.
- Deep vendor ownership and sourcing judgment. You must have personally owned an outsourcing relationship end-to-end (commercial terms, governance, performance management, escalation, difficult conversations)—not just coordinated with someone else. You've built and defended make-versus-buy or vendor expansion cases with cost, quality, and risk modeling, and presented them to senior leadership.
- Portfolio-level ownership. You've run multiple concurrent scale programs with genuine tradeoffs and owned prioritization and capacity calls yourself. You've managed programs where consistency of human execution at volume is the product; you know how to design for repeatability and spot degradation from leading indicators.
- Track record of building durable infrastructure: SLA and scorecard architecture, governance models, transition playbooks, reporting systems—things other teams adopted and still use. You build and maintain models, dashboards, and SLA tracking yourself rather than waiting for others to instrument them.
- Comfort operating where the playbook doesn't exist, with a habit of leaving people better than you found them. You've stepped into situations with no established approach and built one, with judgment about when structure helps versus slows things down. You've mentored program managers or been the person other teams borrow practices from.
